Lots more wind and rain

You could tell it was coming by mid-day Sunday -- it was very humid and temperatures reached almost 85 degrees -- much higher than anytime during the past week.  We went to work at 3 PM, and about 7 the thunderheads started forming and the heat kept coming.  We started seeing lightning about 8, and the park supervisors began shutting down the rides as the flashes grew more significant.  Adventureland closed about 8:45 - just a bit before normal closing, and we all hustled home.  It was very still, and Mark and I even joked about getting a glass of wine and sitting out and watching the amazing cloud formations.  Before we could get changed and the drinks poured, the rain and thunder hit with a vengeance, and stayed pretty consistent for about 2 hours.  The weather radio alert screamed out the warning of a new severe storm front about every 10-15 minutes.

The rain sounded pretty "solid" for a while, but we couldn't verify any evidence of hail.  Then the winds really began to build and about 10PM we had about 5 minutes of gusts estimated at about 65-70 mph (we understand they were clocked at that speed about 2 miles from here).  The Phaeton rocked and rolled, two of our wheel sun covers came off, our big door mat blew down the way, our tiki torch got hammered, and both of Mark's external dishes (TV and Internet) came crashing over.  After verifying that no other damage occurred, and with the weather calming down a bit, we went to bed at about 11PM.

We woke up this morning to the news that, as part of this storm system, a pretty significant tornado hit about 60 miles northeast of Des Moines and seven people are thought to have been killed.  Fortunately, around Altoona there was only minimal and isolated damage -- most of the severe thunderstorms here passed about 10 miles south of the metropolitan Des Moines area.  Most of the weekenders here in tents and tent trailers got pretty hammered, and almost all of them are packing up their wet stuff and leaving.  It still looks unsettled for today, and tomorrow will give us some significantly cooler weather, along with the ever-constant precipitation - the high is forecast to be only 54 degrees!

So, we weathered the first storm here, and suspect that this is not the end of it -- lots of folks here have told us that the weather this season is very "un-seasonable".  We were very impressed by the management at Adventureland and their procedures to make sure that both the workers and our customers were completely safe in the face of the ugly weather.